Members of a Chinese-American family based in Silicon Valley deal with the passing of their patriarch. As news of Stanley Huang's bleak diagnosis settles in, his ex-wife and adult children all face other complications in their lives.
While Wang tosses out more plot threads than she finally reels in, and the connections among the stories of the five characters aren’t always as apparent as they might be, she explores Silicon Valley subculture with wit and ultimately reveals a deep understanding of her feckless strivers.
... insightful, witty and acutely honest ... In Family Trust, [Wang's] dissection of the glamorous appeal of this superficial slice of life succeeds on many levels and will appeal to a wide variety of readers.
By now the clichés [about families] write themselves. Yet debut author Kathy Wang confidently leans into them, spicing up old stories — the tense reunions and fatal betrayals and dying fathers — with fresh faces ... Wang writes from a witty, sarcastic distance; she’ll zoom out when the family gathers for a meal, reveling in their dysfunction, before tightening around a pivotal character moment, the prose suddenly awash with warmth ... But Family Trust gets only so much out of the minutiae; it occasionally plods, unlike more streamlined novels of its type. At least Wang has her setting: She depicts Silicon Valley with seductive specificity, telling tales of instant billionaires and offering glimpses of irritable geniuses changing the world.
